Author Neil W. Murphy

Book Price 
£10.00 paperback
£1.99 e-book, Publisher's ePub Edition and Publisher's Kindle Edition (February Valentines offer). The Kindle version is currently only available through Amazon Kindle worldwide.

Book Description
Neil's War: One boy’s story of his evacuation to Ireland at the outbreak of WWII. This is the story of the author evacuated in 1939 at the age of six with his brother and sister from Sheffield to the safety of relatives in Cork in southern Ireland and his return to Britain in 1943. The second part of the book covers two more war years in his home city all but flattened by the German Blitz of December 1940. It ends on VE Night 1945.

What this small boy gets up to in Ireland beggars belief. The author had an affinity with his Irish hosts and his four-year stay is not without humour. But the incidents he recalls include the firing of Cork’s largest department store, Grant's, in 1942 and providing the intelligence that may have caused the torpedoeing of the SS Irish Oak in May 1943 by the German submarine U-607. This incident of the sinking of a neutral ship prompted diplomatic exchanges between Britain, Ireland, America and Nazi Germany and almost brought down de Valera's government. The Irish section of the book ends with the boy, not yet ten years old, being interviewed by and deported on de Valera's personal order.

The young Neil's adventures do not stop there. The second part of the book includes a harrowing account of the 11-year old stowing away in a Lancaster Bomber piloted by his uncle on a raid over Berlin. By VE Night the young lad, now a precocious twelve-year old, has become more interested in girls, as you might expect.

We think the book is a classic in the genre of wartime memoires. We also believe it is unique in being recalled through hypnotic regression and thereby told through the eyes of the boy himself. The author was a practicing hypnotherapist for much of his working life and on his retirement revisited this period of his childhood seeking answers to memories and flashbacks that had haunted him for more than sixty years. He tells in his preface how this was achieved.

It is a one-off story told by a lad growing up too quickly. It is also one with dark undertones. You must decide whether he was an innocent used by the unscrupulous Republican agent Finnegan, by Sister Ann of “the Mission”, Stan of Short’s slaughter house, his wily cousin Clare who took his earnings for dresses and his uncle who took it for drink. Or whether he rose to the challenge of being separated from his parents at a very young age in difficult times. It is also an emotional story not least because of the shooting down over occupied France early in 1944 of the boy’s hero, Uncle Bill.

The Epilogue is a tribute to him, Wing Commander W. M. Russell DFC & Bar and the crew of Halifax LL 280 of 138 Squadron on its last mission out of Tempsford RAF dropping an SOE agent. An eye-witness account of the shooting down of the Halifax on the morning of 8 May 1944 is given by a young farmer's son. 
 

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Related Painting

This picture painted by Neil’s mother Christina Murphy, a trained artist before her marriage, is probably unique. The air raid that became known as the Sheffield Blitz had just started and Neil’s parents were ordered out of the cinema at Moorhead by the ARP into the gents toilets opposite. The Moor, Sheffield’s main shopping centre, was completely destroyed during several hours of bombing and Neil’s parents were in the middle of it.

While Neil’s doctor father was tending wounded his mother took down a poster from the toilet wall (advising ‘Clinic’ opening times!) and on the back of it made a series of sketches of the scene from the toilet entrance. The two firemen in the picture were soon forced to seek shelter in the toilet because of the ferocity of the bombing and because the water main had been destroyed. They told her the raid was a bad one, not least because one of their fire engines had received a direct hit in Porter Street and its crew killed.

When it was eventually safe to leave the shelter in the early hours, Neil’s parents got a lift from the fireman to their HQ at Division Street. From there they picked up their car and returned home through Broomhill which had remained unscathed to find Neil’s younger brothers Paddy and David safe and asleep with the maid. Unable to sleep, Neil’s mother used the sketches to produce the painting she was proud to say she completed within twenty-four hours of the sirens first sounding!

Because of the presence of Queen Victoria on a column by the public toilet, Neil’s mother titled the picture “Her Majesty was not Amused, Sheffield Blitz. Moorhead 12/12/40”. She told Neil later she had shortened the column since the statue had been most of the night obscured by choking smoke and ash. For twenty-fours after the attack, the city was shrouded with dust and grit, some of which can be seen on the painiting. The clock on Sheffield Town Hall in the scene shows the time at 11.45 pm, when the bombing was already well under way.

The original painting is oil on canvas, 50 x 40 cm (20 x 16 inches approximately). A 60 x 70 cm poster (life-size plus a 10-centimetre white border) is available from us at £20 UK post paid. Please contact us directly.